“Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday, today i-is Friday, Friday, we-we-we so excited, we so excited
We gonna have a ball today. Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards. I don't want this weekend to end.”

No, that isn’t a quote from a preschooler proudly showing that she finally knows the days of the week. Sadly, those are lyrics to “Friday”: what Ark Music Factory and the singer, Rebecca Black, hoped would be the next “big hit”, but has been repeatedly described as, “the worst song ever.” Four minutes of auto-tuned garbage that makes your brain rot and drives you to turn the crap off and listen to some Justin Bieber. Pathetic isn’t it?

And it gets worse. Check out the music video. Rebecca goes to the bus stop to “catch her bus” but then instead gets into a car driven by her thirteen year old friends (but only after she takes way too much time deciding whether she should choose the front seat or the back seat.) By the way, she never seems to make it to school. Instead, she spends the remainder of her weekend, “Partying, partying, YEAH!” with her pre-teen buddies, when they really should be at home finishing up their homework and playing board games or something.

Let’s do some background on her and this, umm, “production”: Rebecca’s mom paid Ark Music Factory, a California talent agency, to write and produce a song and a music video with her daughter. Rebecca said she hoped that this would jump-start her singing career. Both she and her mother were aware of the ridiculous lyrics. So, the video was uploaded to YouTube on March 11, 2011. It is now the 24th. As of this moment, her music video has 43,576,329 views, and her song has sold thousands of copies on iTunes. I think the question everyone is asking has changed from, “Is this some kind of joke?” to “How the HECK is the girl getting so much attention?!?!?!?”

That question was answered by Lady Gaga. “I think Rebecca Black is a genius,” she said. And in a way, she is. Think about it. You hit two markets in one shot. First, you get all the “Bieber-lovers” who are so used to music that makes your ears bleed and means nothing that they actually enjoy the song. Then, you also get the people in their teens and early twenties who just love to hear about something like this so they can tear it to shreds and prove to the world through their witty criticism and commentary that this song is unbelievably horrible. And as they say, any publicity is good publicity. Do you think Rebecca Black cares the least bit that most of her hits and downloads are from people who hate the song? Why should she? They’re still hits and downloads, and she still making loads of money off of all these haters. It’s actually a pretty sad fact about our culture. When’s the last time something spread all over the world so fast because it was really, really good?

Is “Friday” really the worst song ever? No. It’s auto-tuned like crazy, the lyrics sound like something my 5-year old sister would come up with, and the music video is cheesy and makes little to no sense at some points. Honestly, it sounds like one of the many dance songs that are all over the radio by people like J-Sean and Pitbull. It could be one of those lame songs that the Disney Channel kids do but because they have such a massive marketing machine behind them, no one even questions the stupidity of the lyrics. If I had first heard of it in either one of those settings, I probably wouldn’t have even given it a second thought. And on the subject of her actual singing voice, it was so auto-tuned that you don’t even get to see what her voice sounds like.

So I guess the final question is, “Was this really all a genius plot to come up with an insanely laughable song knowing that, being the critics we are, it would be an immediate hit and both AMF and Rebecca Black would make a nice amount of money? Or was this just a girl with a dream and some song writers who really thought this song could be something and figured they’d give it a shot?